Poor old George Romero. He's entering his sunset years now, and every other summer, it seems, somebody takes one of his children away and shoots it. Or rather, reshoots it, which is almost worse. First, it was all those comedy-style remakes of Night Of The Living Dead in the 1980s, then it was Dawn Of The Dead, decently remade, but shorn of its anti-consumerist satire, and now it's The Crazies, his so-so apocalyptic germ-warfare thriller from 1973.

It's happening everywhere these days, and particularly in the career of the man directing this new version of The Crazies. Breck Eisner's next two movies will also be remakes. First up is Flash Gordon, which was remade niftily enough three decades ago by Mike Hodges. I'm willing to concede that such a lengthy passage of time might justify a remake (if you think remakes are acceptable on any terms), but I'm definitely not on board for Eisner's next one: a remake of David Cronenberg's killer-kids classic The Brood. Is nothing sacred?

It turns out, however, that the remake urge may actually be hard-wired into the very DNA of Breck Eisner; he's kind-of a retread himself. If his name's only vaguely familiar, that's because the man who gave it to him, his dad, Michael Eisner, has fallen a long way since he was top dog in this town. Once he was the fabled head of Disney, which he built up in the 1980s, only to bring down again in the mid-1990s, by disastrously hiring his friend, Michael Ovitz (the "super-agent" who remade Hollywood by the rules of "the package" rather than, say, the movie or the script), then spending a fortune to get rid of him again.

And the son also rises. By any measure, right now li'l Breck should be in the midst of a career-ending lost decade-cum-burning doghouse of disgrace after making Sahara, one of the costliest movies ever made, one of the biggest bombs of all time, and the subject of one of the most protracted lawsuits in Hollywood legal history (between Clive Cussler, author of the original novel, and the producers). If I were Michael Eisner's kid, I know for damn sure I'd have availed myself of the pick of the properties doing the rounds, and that I'd have done anything rather than land myself with a screenplay from a novel by Cussler, the man who also wrote Raise The Titanic, one of the biggest flops in British movie history. Precedent, anyone?

But no, daddy's boy did some penitential TV work for a couple of years, and now, presumably after an epic season of paternal arm-twisting around town, here he is helming the one George Romero movie that might actually benefit from a thoughtful and intelligent remake. It took Friedkin, Scorsese, Cimino and Coppola almost a decade to get their careers back on track after their late-70s mega-flops. Can we not be spared Breck Eisner's return for just another few years? Please?